a unique combination of ancient and modern know-how

This site is about a new style of sitar which is using pickups as the only means of capturing the sound. A prototype is fully working with an EMG model 91 accompanied by two hand made custom pickups. It is called “The Traditional Electric”, named after the metamorphosis.

The overall sound of the instrument is very good and you can play on it in exactly the same way as you play on a traditional acoustic sitar. But, you need a good amp.

A radical renovation is the solid body concept. I skipped the original tumba and put a cedar / mahogany solid body instead. So, practically no acoustical feedback (larsen) is occuring even while playing at very high sound levels.

The instrument itself is less fragile because the very breakable tumba is removed and transportation is more efficient because the overall instrument volume decreases: it became equally flat.

Improvements have been made to suit the more detailed aspects of the sitar-sound. Although the EMG sounds good, cikari strings were not covered by the pickup’s surface and thus not being amplified. To achieve this, I designed separate smaller mini pickups for the cikari and tarav strings. They capture the sound only locally and thus the sound of these elements can be adjusted to the player’s desire.

Each of these signals are routed separately to the sitar’s 5 pin’s XLR output, so that they can be further individually processed if desired.